President Trump flew his eldest son’s wedding and staff returned to Washington over the holiday weekend, hoping that the deal with Iran that he said Saturday was “heavily negotiated” will be ready soon. His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was on a four-day trip to India, said Sunday that a deal could come that day. Then he said the same thing on Monday. Yesterday, Rubio suggested that the deal could take “a few more days.” Trump then scheduled a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, the site of the Middle East peace accord, for today, adding to the sense of anticipation. But inclement weather forced the meeting back to the White House, and within the first 10 minutes, with senior administration officials in their red baseball caps surrounding him, Trump admitted he had nothing to reveal. “They really want to make a deal,” Trump said of the Iranians. “So far they haven’t gotten there.”
Nor, of course, does Trump. The deal being negotiated – reported to be a one-page “compromise document” – would put negotiators on a 60-day clock to find a way to address Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its enriched uranium, or “nuclear dust,” as Trump calls it. Trump is deeply frustrated by his inability to fully rein in Iran, aides told us, and angered by analysts who say the ongoing standoff has made him look weak.
Trump’s failure to make a deal is not due to a lack of desire. He has spent weeks trying to find a way out of the conflict. He has tried to force Iran’s surrender with a series of threats and ever-increasing deadlines. But each time, Iran has been talking nonsense, and Trump has found ways to extend the ceasefire, which was put in place before Vice President Vance visited Islamabad in mid-April in hopes of securing a broad agreement but came back empty-handed. Despite his repeated threats, Trump is reluctant to rekindle hostilities; his aides told us that he is mindful of the shortage of US military equipment and fears that Iran will retaliate against the energy infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors, exacerbating the global oil crisis. Aides believe that the US move to close the Strait of Hormuz, and stop the export of Iranian oil, will eventually cause Iran to destabilize. But Trump has expressed impatience with the process and has urged negotiators to step up their efforts.
Middle Eastern leaders over the weekend urged Trump by phone to do what is needed to get an agreement quickly. The region has been hit by strikes by Iran and a dispute over the Gulf Sea, an important channel for Gulf energy exports. Iran closed the channel soon after the war began, stranding hundreds of ships and prompting the United States to initiate its blockade. After the call, Trump wrote on Social Truth that the deal was almost done. It was expected to include the resumption of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, an extended ceasefire in Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the possible lifting of sanctions on Tehran, people familiar with the discussions told us.
Iran hawks who support Trump, already disappointed that Tehran’s regime is still intact, feared the president was rushing a bad deal. “This combination of Iran’s perceived ability to threaten the Gulf permanently” and the ability to “cause serious damage to the oil infrastructure of the Gulf is a major change in the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel,” Senator Lindsey Graham. he said about X. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker has been published on X that “the widespread speculation of a 60-day ceasefire – in the belief that Iran will ever participate in good faith – would be a disaster.”
A Trump aide told us the president was shocked and outraged by such a push. But public criticism, and behind-the-scenes lobbying from Graham and others, was one reason Trump changed his tune. Instead of insisting that a deal was close, he began insisting on social media that the deal was not done at all, and that he would only accept a clear victory—though he did not elaborate on what that would be.
“As President Trump has said, negotiations are going well and he has made his lines clear,” spokeswoman Olivia Wales told us in a statement. “President Trump will only make a good deal for the American people, which must ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump’s instinct is always to get bigger and bigger, creating a backlash with demands for bigger deals. In this case, advisers told us, he held to the long-held idea of linking the Iran deal with the extension of the Abraham Accords — the agreement that normalized relations between Israel and selected Arab states — to create the impression that he was striking a big deal and changing the Middle East. But that outcome seems unlikely, given the condemnation of Israel’s recent conduct and the damage the Gulf states have suffered as a result of the war.
Meanwhile, the Iran talks are still stalled. And the fact that the administration is having a hard time even getting Tehran to the starting gate for talks on Trump’s biggest issue — halting Iran’s nuclear development — bodes poorly for future success.
In 2015, then–Secretary of State John Kerry testified before a Senate committee on a new plan to curb Iran’s nuclear development. After more than a year of negotiations, with Iran on one side and several nations—including the United States, China and Russia—on the other, a deal was on the table, filled with technical details about what Tehran could and could not do for two more decades. The US had many complaints about Tehran. But Kerry said the talks focused on one thing—”the nuclear issue”—for a reason. If other issues were included, Kerry told senators, “it would be a dope rope, sitting there forever, debating one aspect or another.”
Trump in his first term scrapped the deal and in his second term went to war with Iran to try to stop its nuclear program—but also to force the fall of the regime, eliminate Iran’s missile capabilities, and destroy its proxy forces in the Middle East. Now, as the president searches for a way out after a major military campaign failed to achieve any of those goals, Trump appears to be in the predicament he warned Kerry about: Trying to tackle too many issues at once could mean none of them get resolved.
Under the agreement now being negotiated through Qatari arbitrators, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would rise, in stages, to pre-war levels. But Iranian officials want the sea to remain under their control, possibly in cooperation with Oman, even if sea traffic resumes. That may be a no-brainer for the United States, which has insisted that the channel must be free and open, as it was before the war. “That path will be open to everybody. It’s international,” Trump told reporters at a Cabinet meeting.
The proposed agreement could also include provisions for the release of some Iranian assets that were blocked by international sanctions, which Iran views as a form of war reparations, according to people we spoke to who are familiar with the terms. But Trump appeared at a Cabinet meeting to downplay that prospect: “We’re not talking about easing sanctions,” he said.
Whether Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon would be included in the long-term ceasefire was unclear. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that he had ordered an increase in strikes, and Israeli forces intensified their ground campaign.
The complex web of issues is one reason that the plan to end the war has been so difficult. Another is the attitude of the administration in the negotiations. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for starting the war and ending it. Beyond that top line, however, it has been difficult for the American public to tell where things stand. A consistent source of information has been Trump’s Truth Social posts, which are not a model of transparency.
Since returning from Islamabad, Vance has focused more on his anti-fraud campaign. Rubio—the first person to hold the positions of secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger—could follow Kissinger’s style of personally managing America’s exit from the war. Back in the 1970s, Kissinger, with Nixon’s blessing, bypassed the diplomatic corps to secretly meet with a North Vietnamese negotiator several times before putting the ink on the Paris Peace Accords. But Rubio has shown none of the Kissingerian tendencies to get deeply and personally involved. He’s not even the one to target the Iranian regime the way Kerry was for the 2015 deal during the Obama administration. Instead, Rubio has focused more on his line of flexing American muscle in Latin America, first with Venezuela and more recently with Cuba. After his four-day trip to India, he headed to Armenia to sign economic cooperation agreements.
Negotiations to end the war with Iran, instead, have been added to the joint portfolio of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East and real estate friend, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who has no official administration role. The record of the two as international negotiators is mixed. They helped get an agreement for Gaza but have failed to end the war in Ukraine. They have said little publicly about the Iran debate; talks have been more open because Witkoff and Kushner, unlike secretaries of state, do not take any reporters on their trips and rarely hold press conferences to update the public.
Their Iranian counterparts, meanwhile, doubt that the envoys are genuine in their pursuit of peace, people familiar with Iranian thinking told us. During previous rounds of negotiations, Trump has twice ordered the launch of missiles and several times has threatened more. Earlier this week, the United States fired missiles at targets in southern Iran, citing a need for self-defense, which Iran said showed “bad faith and distrust.”
Trump has long been the master of proving his own truth; he simply declares something a victory, and his faithful followers follow. The method is about to be retested. So far in this war, polls show that Americans are generally unhappy with Trump’s decision, which has caused economic pain at home. Gas prices are up, with visible and meaningful reminders posted on service station signs lining roads and highways across America.
If the deal is put together, Trump will claim victory — he already has a few times — but that would be a dubious claim. Hardliners in Iran have been emboldened, and, even if the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, Tehran has shown it can effectively close it in the future. At the very least, the government is well aware of the economic weapon it is using. That gives Iran leverage even as Trump claims that any nuclear deal he makes will be tougher than the Obama administration’s 2015 deal. “I didn’t do this to get a bad deal,” Trump told reporters at a Cabinet meeting.
The 2015 deal did not end hostilities between Washington and Tehran. But Obama administration officials hoped that resolving their biggest dispute would stop a cycle of escalation that has repeatedly brought the two countries to the brink. The plan, in a way, was also a way to avoid war with unpredictable geopolitical consequences. Trump didn’t act with the same caution—and he may now wish he had.
